Green School Grants - Quebec

"The range for this project is vast – 2,500 square kilometres," says environmental educator Alan Earwaker. Using Maniwaki Woodland School northwest of Montreal as a base, Earwaker is leading a team of 50 teachers and 850 students at eight community schools throughout the Outaouais region of Quebec. "The project mission is to empower the students and teachers to become responsible citizens who conserve and protect the natural environment," says Earwaker.

Using the grant money, Earwaker will equip a mobile classroom with field, pond, and insect guides, along with binoculars, snowshoes, and orienteering kits, as well as various ecology games. This inventory supports workshops that will build the environmental capacity of the teachers involved in the project, Earwaker says, allowing them to integrate classroom curriculum with environmental awareness lessons.

The idea behind the capacity building is to establish what Earwaker calls a "learning continuum." That's a need identified by the Institute for Earth Education. "The institute states that ‘students who do not have routine exposure to environmental experiences up to the age of 12 years do not care about nature or the environment.' This project addresses that by establishing a learning continuum with routine exposure from kindergarten to secondary five," says Earwaker. "Continual exposure will instill in our students an appreciation of the outdoors, a wonder of nature, and the development of environmental knowledge and skills."

Earwaker believes the program will also help motivate students to stay in school and to live in, learn about, and protect their local communities and environments. "And that," he say, "is something that is especially important to rural Quebec communities."

Five years ago, a group of students in the rural Quebec town of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts discovered that one of the town's sewer pipes bypassed the wastewater treatment plant and drained directly into the river. That discovery sparked what has become an annual expedition to test the rivers water quality.

"Each year, 15 different students embark on a two-day canoe trip down the North River from its source to Lake Raymond," says Jean-François Giasson, who teaches science at the town's secondary school, Polyvalente-des-Monts. "With adult volunteers, they collect about 40 water samples to test several parameters, such as temperature, phosphorous and nitrate/nitrate content, and fecal coliform count. The students also collect plankton in the lakes they traverse." On their return, the students analyze some of the samples themselves, and send others out for specialized lab testing. "Once they have the results, the students write a status report that is sent to elected officials of municipalities the river runs through," says Giasson. "In summer, tourists come to the river for canoeing and kayaking, fishing, and swimming. Our studies show that the river is sometimes too polluted for these activities."

This school year, the students' expedition will be supported by the grant, which will fund everything from canoe rental and camping supplies, to collection equipment and lab testing. Giasson says the students are hoping to start finding evidence that their efforts over the past five years are having results – this year, Sainte-Agathe began a $20-million program to upgrade its wastewater treatment. Says Giasson, "The effects of this environmental study in the community are very large."

Follow the St. Lawrence River north from Montreal, and you come to a region known for its natural beauty, the Chaudière-Appalaches. It's named after the Chaudière River that meanders through it and the Appalachian Mountains that border its southern reaches, but it's also famous for its forests of maple and oak. It's those forests that have inspired St. Damien Secondary School, in one of the region's villages, to launch the project "Do a Lot with a Little."

"Our students will collect maple seeds and oak acorns that we find in the forests," says Valérie Bégin, a social worker at the school, "then transplant them into potting soil in our organic greenhouse." The grant funds will buy the soil and nursery boxes. Although the region is forested, the school grounds aren't landscaped, and the goal of the project is to beautify them, particularly the recreation area. "Because it's where the school bus is parked it's little used, and at present has a neglected air." Bégin hopes the trees will inspire the students to spend time outdoors.

The project plan is to provide each of the school's 325 students and 60 staff with a sapling to plant in the grounds around the school and soccer field. "We'll be contributing to improving our environment and reducing greenhouse gas emissions," says Bégin. "Environmental studies confirm that to have a less polluted environment, it's necessary to have trees, and forests."

The project aims to nurture not only the trees but the students, too. "We believe that a greener environment, one where there is respect for nature, can improve the students' daily lives," says Bégin, "and even help keep them in school."

"Enormous quantities of paper are used in an elementary school," says Perptue Polifort, principal of La Fraternit elementary school in Montreal. "Even though we have been recycling paper for many years, our Student Committee wanted to go further and do more with all that paper."

Polifort and the school's teachers decided to help the students towards the goal by coming up with an innovative initiative that supports both the environment and learning: a school pulp mill. The students transform the schools waste paper into handcrafted paper ttthat they use in class projects.

Polifort says the pulp mill not only preserves the forest and its capacity to regenerate, but also reduces consumption of goods. Plus, "because it's a concrete situation, the pulp mill facilitates the integration of knowledge," she says, making the lessons it teaches in protecting the environment lasting ones.

The only issue with the pulp mill has been its limited equipment, which has restrained the number of students who can use it. With the grant funds, the school will be able to buy a full complement of paper-making equipment, including a shredder, pulp mixers, sieves, felts, sponges and dryers. Polifort says the school will also now be able to train all the teachers how to use the paper-making equipment so that they, in turn, can train the students.

"Our pulp mill has an important role to play in fighting climate change," says Polifort. "Now everyone at the school will be an integral part of the project."

Mischa Schuler believes gardens can nurture many experiences beyond what she calls hands-on "dirt time."

Schuler is a laboratory technician at Richmond Regional High School in Richmond, QC. Along with the school's six science teachers, Schuler is dedicated to and engaged in transforming the schoolyard's current grass monoculture into a garden oasis. There will be elderberry and blueberry bushes, apple, plum, pear, apricot and cherry trees, and grapevines -- all bought with grant funds. More than a hundred students will be involved in planting, caring for and harvesting them.

However, those classic gardening activities are just the beginning, Schuler explains, of what the project will spark. "Our woodshop class will incorporate the design and building of shade structures and benches into their curriculum. Art students will have a vibrant new model for outdoor watercolour painting." Each fall, the art students will create a "living sculpture" as a centrepiece for the garden. Students in culinary classes will pick fruits and vegetables to pickle and preserve. The garden will provide dye plants for a Native arts cycle, seeds for a seed exchange with another school, and medicinal herbs for the natural remedies the Science Club will learn to make. "Our garden will be a space of biodiversity, colour, scent and creativity," says Schuler.

And that will make it place where it's not always necessary to be engaged in curricular activities. "An equally important aspect is experiencing the simple pleasure of enjoying lunch in the garden with friends, and developing lasting memories."

"The average amount of waste produced per child in a Canadian school is 67 pounds per school year," says Bhanu Kotecha, a science teacher at Lake of Two Mountains High School, which is known as LTMHS. "The aftermath of a lunch hour at LTMHS," Bhanu adds, "is proof of this."

Kotecha is one of three staff members and 20 students who have founded the Environmentally Conscious Outreach, or ECO, Project. Because the rural community where the school is located, Deux Montagnes, Que., is unable to provide LTMHS with a waste disposal service, the ECO Project team is taking matters into the own hands.

They'll not only be constructing a composter with materials funded by the grant, but also be developing a campaign to motivate students to get involved. There will be questionnaires, assessment forms and waste audits to test and build awareness about school trash. The project team will also develop a list of biodegradable lunch alternatives to recommend to students, their parents and staff.

"Teaching children about the environment is an important part of education in school as well as in the community," says Kotecha. "The ECO Project is valuable as a practical application  in promoting and developing LTMHS as an environmentally conscious facility."

A crank cotter gauge, a torque wrench and a chain cleaner: Those are just a few of the tools that this grant will be buying the Philemon Wright Bike Repair and Maintenance Program.

The program is a joint project of the Environmental Club and the Work Oriented Training Path Program, or WOTP, at Philemon Wright High School in Gatineau, Que. "The WOTP students are involved in education through a work program, instead of the standard graduation program," explains Brant Churchill, a teacher at Philemon Wright.

"The students in the WOTP program will learn bike repair and maintenance as part of their curriculum," says Churchill. "The curriculum will also include lessons and projects on the benefits of biking for health and the community's environment." Meanwhile, the Environmental Club will use the tools the grant funds buy to learn to fix their own bikes and to repair scrap bikes for donation to low-income families.

The goal of the program is to facilitate learning about green forms of transportation, says Churchill, in theory and in practice. "We're trying to teach students how to bike sustainably not only for fun, but as a form of basic transportation," he says. And, he adds, "If you're able to maintain your own bike, you'll have fewer problems while biking and will be less likely to abandon this form of transportation when your bike has a few problems."

"Our school is located close to the downtown core, and we have almost no green space surrounding the building." That's how teacher Linda Handiak describes Vanguard Intercultural School in Westmount, Que., a neighbourhood of Montreal. "However," adds Handiak, "we do have a flat roof on which we could start a garden."

"The Sky is the Limit" is a project to create that garden, which will focus on edible plants. Helping the project will be advisors from city hall and the University of Quebec at Montreal, which sells planters suitable for rooftop gardens. The grant will fund the purchase of the planters, plus soil, seeds and organic fertilizer.

The garden is a natural fit with the school's approach to learning. "Our students have some learning disabilities," says Handiak, "but they are able to follow a regular curriculum using multisensory adaptation." Handiak says the Grade 9 science teacher is eager to involve her students in the garden, "and the Grade 8 math teacher, who uses recipes to teach concepts."

The project was conceived by seven students who steer the school's social justice committee, says Handiak, who also sits on the committee. If the garden prospers, they plan to bring produce to a local community kitchen. "The garden will serve not only to teach academic subjects," she says, "but also to sow good citizenship." The sky's the limit, indeed.

"Our school lunchroom produces a shocking amount of waste," says Marie-Michele Fradet, a teacher at Drummondville Elementary School, "so much that the janitor has to empty garbage cans before the hour is over."

Fradet and another teacher, together with their classes, are hoping to change all that with their Waste-Free Lunches project. "Many of our students bring packaged, processed foods to school. We will create an awareness of how much garbage is produced by using over-packaged products and we will reduce the garbage production in a concrete way."

To establish a baseline for improvement, the project team will measure the amount of garbage produced from student lunch boxes in the first two weeks of the school year. Then they'll educate the school community about the need to reduce that waste, using student-led presentations, posters, graphs, newsletters and podcasts. The grant will support the production of those communication vehicles, and allow the team to buy a six-piece spill-proof reusable plastic lunch container for every student, and a composting bin for every classroom.

The team will continue to measure the amount of waste produced throughout the school year and publish their results. The goal, says Fradet, is to encourage continued participation and improvement and to demonstrate that "small changes can have a significant impact on the environment."

The Network of Alternatives Centre is a high school in Pointe Claire, Quebec, for at-risk youth. "Many of our students have been through several different schools and we are specialized at helping them," says science teacher Diisa Niemi. "We can act as a positive influence on the community and the environment by growing heritage species of vegetable and edible plants."

The school will grow those plants in a greenhouse on the school property that the students will design and build. Money from the grant will buy the wood and glass for construction, and the soil and heritage seeds for planting. "The students will care for the greenhouse and the plants for the duration of the growing season," says Niemi. All the while, they'll be learning about soil, composting, water conservation and the importance of heritage seeds to biodiversity.

"When it comes time to harvest," says Niemi, we'll use the produce in our cooking classes." In the school's cooking program, students learn to plan, make and serve healthy meals.

Niemi hopes that the greenhouse project will help motivate some of the students to stay in school, and introduce them to new skills and career ideas, such as carpentry, construction and gardening. Working on a goal " in this case, building a greenhouse and growing a harvest " "helps students stay focused on their education," says Niemi, "and hopefully fosters the desire to make the planer a greener place."